Publisher's Description

In today's world, everything is digital. From shopping receipts to important research papers, your life often fills your hard drive in the form of emails, PDFs, Word documents, multimedia files and more. Questions eventually pop up, like where do you store all of this stuff? How do you organize these very different file types, and even better, how do you find the exact file you're looking for the second you need it? It's almost as if you need a second brain just to keep your digital life straight.

DEVONthink is the solution to the digital age conundrum. It is your second brain, the one and only database for all your digital files, be they PDFs, emails, Word docs or even multimedia files. Boasting a refined artificial intelligence, DEVONthink is exceedingly flexible and adapts to your personal needs. And if the files are not digital yet, digitize them with DEVONthink Pro Office.

Use it as your document repository, your filing cabinet, your email archive, or your project organizer; DEVONthink can do it all. You can even collect and organize data from the web for your own use, enrich it with sound and movie files from your hard drive, and then export the finished product as a website or to an Apple Pages document to print, should you so desire. Or copy the content to your iPod! The possibilities are only as limited as your imagination.

The new version does have a lot of the bell and whistles that many people of today will enjoy. I am not going to list them here. However they have complicated some of the basic features others looked for in using their system. Example, easier to find multi data bases if you use more than one data base. However in our view, they lost some of their simplicity.

Cons

The new version took the simplicity out of filing files in the event you wish to use it as a paperless office or as a filing program. The old version 1 had it where you could scan and file directly into an open folder that a person had set up within their system. The new version they have set up inboxes. Where no matter what you scan goes into the inbox that you have chosen under preferences. From there you have to hunt down the folder you want what you scanned to go to and drag it to. If you have lots of files like our office does, it slows down our office by about 50%. You have lost the funcition to have it scan directly into an open folder which to use was a key feature in going with this program originally. They simply complicated this feature which Devon was known for in prior versions. We were forced to update from the old version because we update to the 10.8.5 from the prior OSX and we were told the old version of Devon would not work well in 10.8.5.

Summary

As we use Devon mailing for that of a Paperless Office we are disappointed in the new version in that area. If you are looking for true simplicity and ability of being able to scan and save directly in a folder, stay away from Devon 2.7.2.. They have made something simple, more complicated, and if you have a busy office or business with a lot of files, it will take you longer to get the job done then with the old version. No one in our office likes the new version for filing because of the extra steps. If you talk to them at the company, they say they vastly improved the overall features of their program, which in some ways they have. Not for our use. We feel they should add a feature in preferences to allow the choice where one does not have to use their new inbox system to scan to, but provide an option to be able to click a folder, have it open up, and allow whatever files we scan in, to scan directly into the file folder and bypass the time consuming inbox system in their new version totally.

Bought this to use the included server feature as a solution for bridging my iPhone with docs on my Mac. So I set it up and successfully browse to my DEVONthink server database using Readdle docs. Cool! Now I can easily find PDFs (etc) that I want to download with Readdle. NOT! The first document I navigate to returns this message:

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.There is apparently no way to enter the serial number. The instruction provided do not work. They work HARD at protecting themselves from piracy! So hard, their serial number scheme does not work!

...yourThis review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.There is nothing quite like this program and V2 is going to be even better.

I've been using this now with my all-in-one color laser machine to keep track of all of those documents and other bits of information that a person in the digital age seems to collect constantly. Contracts, warrantees, invoices, tax information, membership information, personal info, etc.

I really appreciate the OCR ability so I can turn nearly anything into a searchable document. OCR isn't perfect, of course, but it does the trick in most cases.

While the Pro Office version is priced out of the range of most people, it is a handy tool and thanks to the fact the Devon Technologies offers an upgrade path from each version of their product to the next makes it a bit easier for people to slowly trade up as their needs grow.

I tried looking for a program like this for Windows and there isn't anything even remotely close. The reciept and page managers don't do half of what DTPO can.

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.I had used DEVONthink Personal initially and then moved up to Pro and, finally, Pro Office. Although it was an application I used every day, I wasn't getting that warm fuzzy feeling. I searched around and purchased a competing application, Together, and thought I had found true love. Then the beta of DEVONthink Pro Office 2 was announced, and I decided to give the relationship another try. These guys have REALLY been hard at work! Love reborn! New and improved features are too numerous to mention, but I must say it does for my workflow what moving from dial-up to cable did for my web browsing. And they're not done yet! Try it, spend some time with it, kick the tires, burn some rubber. Print to DEVONthink instead of paper, and help save the forests. This baby rocks! (Sorry for the overabundance of metaphors. I couldn't resist.)

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.Not only is this NOT vaporware, it is one of the best-managed releases of a feature-rich product that I've seen in a long time.

The public betas are anything but vaporware as they are in use by longtime 1.0 users as well as a whole group of new users. The betas work and there's no excuses.

Have you even tried this out? Apparently not since one download and thirty minutes worth of using it will prove beyond any doubt to the reasonably intelligent soul that this application is very usable, totally supported by the very responsive developer, and handles tons of data and tasks.

Get your head out of the sand and give it a whirl. You might be surprised.

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.I don't frequent VT that much these days, and was surprised to find such low ratings for DTPO.
I began using DEVONthink Pro in 2005, and when the Office version was released I upgraded.
I would not compare it to Spotlight, since it does much more.
There are a few screencasts showing DTPO's capabilities, as well as a manual and a very useful forum, not to mention their responsive customer support.
I usually would not rate a beta version, but my rating reflects my overall experience with DT, including the latest beta.

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